From Oxford to New York and Back

In 2016 I was awarded one of the Fulbright-Schuman pre-doctoral fellowships in order to conduct research at Columbia University in the city of New York. Hosted by Professor Tim Frye, at the Political Science Department I researched how economic sanctions affect politics in targeted countries.

The time I spent at Columbia was tremendously enriching and inspiring. My academic host and all the students at the Department were incredibly welcoming, and I couldn’t be more grateful for all the amazing opportunities I had to present my work, and receive invaluable feedback on my dissertation. In classes, workshops and seminars, I was privileged to meet and work with some truly amazing researchers working on similar areas in comparative politics. In April 2017, we were very happy to welcome some of them for a similar workshop at the University of Oxford. Collaborations we built at Columbia helped put the research agenda for the workshop together, and it was really wonderful to see people from my host and home institutions coming together to discuss their work.

Colleagues who visited Oxford for this one-day workshop on authoritarian politics joined us from Russia (the Higher School of Economics in Moscow), the United States (Columbia and George Washington University), and Germany (the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich). Visiting and Oxford-based researchers, we engaged in fruitful discussions, and explored new directions in the study of contemporary electoral authoritarianism. The workshop, which aimed specifically to nurture academic conversations across academic institutions, offered participants the time and opportunity to receive detailed feedback on their work and to meet colleagues from leading institutions around the world. In addition, it was delightful to see that the workshop, which was generously supported by the Commission for Educational Exchange between the United States of America, Belgium and Luxembourg and the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford, helped increase the visibility of the Fulbright-Schuman programme among the Department’s vibrant community of graduate students and researchers.

This event is yet another reminder of all the incredible opportunities the Fulbright-Schuman programme can create for young scholars, promoting as it does academic exchanges and research dialogue across academic institutions around the world!